Plastic Surgery Unit, Surgery Department, Suez Canal University, Ismailia, Egypt; Department of Hand Surgery, Plastic Surgery and Burns, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden; Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden. Electronic address: islam.abdelrahman@liu.se.
The Linköping burn score has been used for two decades to calculate the cost to the hospital of each burned patient. Our aim was to validate the Burn Score in a dedicated Burn Centre by analysing the associations with burn-specific factors: percentage of total body surface area burned (TBSA%), cause of injury, patients referred from other (non-specialist) centres, and survival, to find out which of these factors resulted in higher scores. Our second aim was to analyse the variation in scores of each category of care (surveillance, respiration, circulation, wound care, mobilisation, laboratory tests, infusions, and operation). We made a retrospective analysis of all burned patients admitted during the period 2000-15. Multivariable regression models were used to analyse predictive factors for an increased daily burn score, the cumulative burn score (the sum of the daily burn scores for each patient) and the total burn score (total sum of burn scores for the whole group throughout the study period) in addition to sub-analysis of the different categories of care that make up the burn score. We retrieved 22301 daily recordings for inpatients. Mobilisation and care of the wound accounted for more than half of the total burn score during the study. Increased TBSA% and age over 45 years were associated with increased cumulative (model R2 0.43, p